On 13 February 2015 at 23:54, James Hare <james.hare@wikidc.org> wrote:
On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Liam Wyatt wrote:
Dear GLAMWiki-verse, 

[tl;dr Seeking feedback. Please read the GWT 2.0 grant application draft before I submit it officially: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset ]


Thank you very much for taking ownership of GLAMwiki Toolset—a huge project that the WMF is not interested in and no one else really has the resources for.

I consider this project central to Wikimedia DC’s strategic priorities and consider its funding to be essential. I am critical of a couple of points:
* On the must/should/could/won’t scale, I would consider “improving documentation” to be a lot higher than simply “could.” A regular criticism I hear of the toolset is that the documentation is lousy, and if your goal is to encourage more people to use it without expert help, you need better documentation. I would consider elevating the priority for this.
* You will get dinged on your labor rates. Is there a particular reason why it costs $100/hour to build an upload tool, a piece of software that is not terribly specialized—even when considering EU labor rates? This isn’t really a concern for me or Wikimedia DC since we’re not paying for it, but I would be prepared to discuss this should it come up.

Those points aside, I really look forward to seeing the improvements that come out of this project. Best of luck to you and Europeana!


Cheers,
James

—
James Hare
President, Wikimedia DC
@wikimediadc 
Thanks for the endorsement James :-)
[hint, hint... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset#Endorsements ]

I'm going to respond to the financial question right away because a couple of other people have asked me similar things offlist. It's a valid topic to raise so I might as well publicly reply-all :-) I'll paraphrase this issue as two questions:

Question 1: How do you justify the labor rates?
Answer: To try to answer that, I have added a new paragraph in the grant application earlier today:
"The daily-rate of the different roles listed here is calculated based on the average hourly salary of the relevant Europeana employees. As a project-based organisation that frequently accepts funding tied to specific objectives, Europeana frequently operates by accounting for its staff obligations in 1 hour blocks. Therefore, the costs listed here are not invented specifically for a grant application, they are simply the normal hourly salary of that person x 8 hours = 1 daily rate." https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset#Total_cost_per_role

I hope this answers the question sufficiently, although I do understand that it is not the detailed "justification" that you might like. In short, this is just how much the relevant staff cost.

Question 2: Could it be done cheaper elsewhere?
Answer: Yeah - probably. No one is pretending that Europeana is the cheapest organisation for building software - especially since it does not normally build software for external organisation - but they're also the only ones with the technical ability, organisational willingness and availability right now. Some others might have the capacity, or the willingness, or the availability - but not all three.  

As with the first question, I hope that this explains sufficiently. It is a fair question, and I've tried to give it as straightforward an answer as I can.

p.s. I may not be able to respond quickly to any further questions for the next couple of days (it being the weekend and all). 

-Liam / Wittylama
In my capacity as "that Europeana guy"